Development of the southern high plains: a social and agricultural history

Human driving forces: commodity specialization in cotton

The vulnerability of the cotton economy of the Ilano Estacado

Social responses to environmental change and economic vulnerability

The future of the southern high plains

Conclusions

References

Interviews

Conclusions

Institutional support for maintaining the settlements of the Llano
Estacado enjoys a long-standing tradition, dating from the earliest attempts to
establish permanent agriculture-based communities. The social history of the
Southern High Plains is essentially a history of institutional and technological
devices to overcome what was environmentally untenable - rainfall-based
agriculture. From the Four Sections Act in 1887, to the Agricultural Assistance
Administration in 1933 and the price-support programmes and federal farm
subsidies in the 1970s and 1980s, federal and state agencies have buttressed and
enabled the process of environmental change. Farm credit programmes, with their
beginnings in the farm relief programmes of the 1930s, have been especially
critical for maintaining agriculture.

Farmers followed a fairly typical pattern of agriculturalists in
the Great Plains. Their first attempts at sod-busting and crop production failed
during every drought. Many left the area; some stayed. But, over time,
irrigation, transportation, storage, production and marketing technologies,
extension services, and credit formed the basis for economic success and market
competitiveness. With higher fuel costs, less water, more competitors, smaller
market shares, and lower soil fertility, that comparative advantage has slipped.
The region is now one of the most technologically advanced agricultural systems
in the United States. Many of the farmers have college degrees, and only the
best managers have survived the 1980s. Even so, farm credit delinquencies,
foreclosures, and bankruptcies are increasing. At the end of 1990, over 40 per
cent of all Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) loans for the Southern High
Plains were delinquent, and the majority of these were emergency loans (South
Plains Association of Governments 1991). Meanwhile there is nowhere else to
move, no extra margin for the moment.

The transformation of the environment from a complex mature
grassland to a monocropped agricultural/social landscape on the verge of
collapse took very little time. In less than a generation, the change has become
evident. The transformation took vast amounts of capital, technological
development, institutional support, and human endeavour. If the history of the
pre-European settlement of the Southern High Plains is a portrait of a stable,
evolved, plant-wildlife ecosystem, with and without human occupancy, then the
history of post-European settlement is really a history of forced adjustment,
transplantation, and extinction.

A major outcome of the Dust Bowl era is the full
institutionalization of a way of life on the Llano Estacado. A policy and
support infrastructure has propped up a farming-based culture, a regional
economy, and a community network in an agriculturally marginal area. The
environmental consequences, several of which are quite serious, serve to remind
us that, despite all the human creativity and perseverance in building a life on
the Southern High Plains, the effective curtailment of the technological inputs
due to a dearth of investment capital and the scaling-back or outright removal
of institutional interventions have propelled the region rapidly toward greater
endangerment and risk of overall regional
collapse.